Automated fast recognition and location of arbitrarily shaped objects by image morphology

Frank Y. Shih, Owen Robert Mitchell

Abstract: Morphological operations are used for segmentation, feature generation and location extraction. A recursive adaptive thresholding algorithm transforms a gray-level image into a set of multiple level regions of objects. A distance transformation algorithm then is used to transform a binary image into the minimum distance from each object point to the object's boundary. This algorithm uses a morphological erosion with a large structuring element which may correspond to Euclidean, city-block, or chessboard distance measures. A shape library database with hierarchical features is automatically generated. The features extracted are the shape number and the skeletal local-maximum points radii and coordinates. Object recognition is achieved by comparing the shape number and the hierarchical radii. Object location is detected by a hierarchical morphological bandpass filter.<